Abstract: Based on dreams after trauma and other recent research a view
of the nature of dreaming is developed along the following lines. Dreaming makes
connections more broadly than waking in the nets of the mind. Dreaming avoids
the "central" rapid input-to-output portions of the net and the
feed-forward mode of functioning; it makes connections in the further out
regions (further from input/output) and in an auto-associative mode. Dreaming
produces more generic and less specific imagery. Dreaming cross-connects. The
connections are not made in a random fashion; they are guided by the emotion of
the dreamer. Dreaming contextualizes a dominant emotion or emotional concern.
This is demonstrated most clearly in dreams after trauma as the trauma resolves
but can likewise be seen in dreams after stress, in pregnancy, and in other
situations where the dominant emotional concern is known. The form that these
connections and contextualizations take is explanatory metaphor. The dream, or
the striking dream image, explains metaphorically the emotional state of the
dreamer. This entire process is probably functional. The dream functions to
spread out excitation or reduce "computational energy" and does this
by cross-connecting and "weaving-in". This has an immediate function
in "calming a storm" or reducing a disturbance, and a longer term
function relating to memory—not so much consolidating memory but rather
cross-connecting, weaving in something new, increasing the connections.

KEY WORDS

: dreaming; dreams; Connectionist nets; psychotherapy;
metaphor.

In some senses we know a great deal about dreaming. As a psychotherapist and
psychoanalyst I have worked with my patients' dreams and my own dreams for many
years and I know that dreams can be immensely useful in therapy and in self
knowledge. I do not question that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious;
but this tells me little about what a dream really is—the nature of the dream.
I have also worked for many years on the biology of REM sleep and I believe we
now understand quite well the biology of the underlying state which is the best
(though not the only) substrate for dreaming. This is essential knowledge and it
provides some basic facts about conditions underlying dreaming; but it does not
tell us what dreaming is.

In some senses, we know very little about dreaming. We still have not agreed
on its basic nature. I have recently been exploring a new approach to dreaming
based on work with dreams after trauma, among other studies, and a new model of
the mind. This has led to some revised formulations of the nature and also the
possible functions of dreaming. The functions I arrive at are very close to
those suggested by many others starting from different data, so what I am doing
here is outlining a contemporary approach to the basic nature and functions of
dreaming.

DREAMING MAKES CONNECTIONS

First of all, dreaming connects. Dreaming makes connections and it
does this extremely broadly. At a clinical or everyday level, one can hardly
disagree with this. For some, dreaming obviously makes beautiful and interesting
connections; but even those who believe dreaming throws things together in a
more or less random fashion must admit that a dream image somehow connects
material in our memories, imaginations, etc. Clearly dreaming makes connections
between recently experienced material (day residue) and old memories; dreaming
often puts together or combines two different people, two different places, two
different parts of our lives in the mechanism Freud refers to as condensation.

This tendency of dreaming to make connections very broadly or widely has been
frequently noted. For instance, Erik Craig (1992) puts it, "While dreaming
we entertain a wider range of human possibilities than when awake; the 'open
house' of dreaming is less guarded." Elizabeth Campbell (1987) says,
"Anything can happen in a dream. There are no boundaries." Many have
simply called dreaming "hyperconnective." Of course,
"broadly" is not necessarily a self evident term; as we shall see
below, dreaming makes connections "broadly" in many senses but may
also avoid certain regions of our minds.

DREAMING MAKES CONNECTIONS MORE BROADLY THAN WAKING IN THE NETS OF THE MIND

In order to discuss further the meaning of "making connections" at
a basic level, we require a rough model of the mind. There is always a danger in
picturing the mind according to our latest technological advances, a practice
which has led to images such as the "hydraulic" or "steam
engine" model of the mind soon succeeded by the calculating machine or
computer model and now by a network model which may perhaps prove as ephemeral
as the rest. Nonetheless, since we think in terms of visual models, I believe we
definitely require some such image to hang our thoughts upon and at this
particular point, I believe the best model involves a net or perhaps a network
of nets. In fact, models employing net images have proliferated lately. Such
nets are sometimes optimistically called "neural nets" in hopes that
they will correspond with the actual structure of the cerebral cortex, or more
conservatively "connectionist nets" described by computer models,
assuming a large number of simple "on-off" units with variable
connection strengths between them, and information widely distributed
("parallel distributed processing").

Even very simple connectionist models with only a few tens or hundreds of
interconnected units have shown striking success in modeling certain aspects of
how humans learn simple tasks. For instance such a net can model quite well our
learning to form past tenses of regular and irregular verbs (Rumelhart and
McClelland 1986) or performance on the Stroop color-naming test (Cohen, et. al.
1990). And, in fact, several researchers including Fookson and Antrobus (1992),
Globus (1993), and Palombo (1992) have already attempted to apply certain
aspects of connectionist net modeling to the process of dreaming.

I have postulated "connecting" and "reconnecting" as
basic aspects of dreaming (Hartmann 1973, 1976, 1991b) but without specifying
any particular net mechanism. In what follows I envision nets that derive from
but need to be more complex than the connectionist nets specified so far. But I
hope to maintain the elegance and simplicity of the assumptions of the model:
the entire net is constructed of simple units and the connections between units.
All that occurs is a flow of excitation in the nets determined by connection
strengths between units; the use of the net determines and changes connection
strengths so that the weights are slightly different each time the excitation
has passed. Memory is the totality of all the connection weights in the net. A
given mental "event"—a specific thought, fantasy, or dream image
represents the excitation or lighting up of some widely distributed grouping of
units.

In this sort of net, all that can happen during waking or during dreaming is
the lighting up of certain patterns and the strengthening or weakening of the
weights on certain connections; we make connections all the time. I suggest that
there is an important difference: dreaming connects more broadly and more widely
than does waking; in this sense dreaming can be considered "hyperconnective".
Figure 1 illustrates part of what I have in mind. This is a highly simplified
rendering in two dimensions of a few aspects of the net using a "spread of
excitation" model. I suggest that in waking there is a tendency for linear
development of specific imagery usually guided by a specific task or goal. For
instance, in terms of something like a house, my waking mind seldom pictures a
generic house; rather it is looking for a particular house to answer a specific
question: "Where did I live in 1980?" The entire pattern lights up
representing not just house but a specific house in my memory and in fact, the
specific house in which I lived in 1980. The excitation follows a set pattern;
it remains in a "groove", with relatively little "spread".

In dreaming, I suggest the progression is less specific and less focused. The
pattern representing "house" may be lit up, but then rather than only
moving to a specific house, the excitation process also spreads
"laterally" to patterns representing other houses and other similar
structures—hotels, institutions, etc. Waking—and for now I am speaking of
focused waking thought, the sort of waking thought that is furthest from
dreaming—tends to stay in a sort of "groove" or "rut"
whereas dreaming thought tends to wander and combine. The setting for a dream
can often be a generic house or a combination of several houses. In looking over
100 of my recent dreams in which I had very carefully noted details of the
setting, I found that the most common settings (60%) involved a kind of generic
house (or room or outdoor area); a house that was partly my house and partly a
different, unknown house, a room that was partly a lobby and partly a lecture
hall, etc. Freud's best known dream likewise starts with a generic setting:
"A great hall...". These common "generic" settings would be
scored as either "unfamiliar" or "questionable" settings in
Hall and Van de Castle's standard content analysis (1966); their norms in
students are 57% (male) and 53% (female) for the sum of these two categories.

This characteristic of dreaming as opposed to focused waking thought is
consistent with the biology of REM sleep—the best though not only biological
substrate of dreaming. I suggested as early as 1973, based on a number of
pharmacological studies, that dreaming represents the functioning of the cortex
without the influence of norepinephrine (Hartmann 1973). This has since been
confirmed, extended, and elaborated using studies of single neurons and many
other techniques (for a review, see Siegel 1993 or Hobson 1988). The action of
norepinephrine on the cortex has been summarized as "increasing
signal-to-noise ratio" or producing "inhibitory sharpening"
(Foote, et. al. 1975, Woodward, et. al. 1979, Servan-Schreiber, et. al. 1990,
Hartmann 1973) (These descriptions fit best its action at beta-adrenergic
receptors). Such action can readily be mapped onto figure 1. Broader connections
in dreaming, more "generic" or combined rather than
"specific" images, means less inhibitory sharpening or lower
signal-to-noise ratio in the spread of excitation.

In figure 2, I outline, again very roughly, a model of the brain seen as a
growing complexity of interconnections (interneurons) superimposed on the
simplest "reflex arc" connection between sensory input and motor
output. In this simplified picture I place mental activities such as calculating
(for instance plotting trajectories in hunting prey or in catching a baseball)
as still relatively close to the "center" though of course they
involve complex interconnections. All our verbal and mathematical abilities,
which activate many different parts of the cortex according to recent imaging
studies (see for instance Grafman and Tamminga 1995; Holcomb, et. al. 1995), are
nonetheless placed relatively "centrally" in this diagram. The
"outer reaches" consist of the memory nets more readily accessed in
reverie, daydreaming, and dreaming. This is a land populated by moving pictures
and by metaphor (by the potential for producing pictures and metaphor—see
below) with relatively little direct connection to sensory input or motor
output. In this sort of picture, focused waking is more a hunt and dreaming is
more an exploration.

I suggest that typical focused goal-directed waking thought makes connections
in the relatively more central portions (on this diagram) that lead relatively
rapidly from sensory input to motor output, or at least to some definite
"result" or "solution", whereas dreaming makes connections
more widely, especially in the "far out" regions. In fact, dreaming
seems to avoid the "central" rapid-processing areas and functions. I
have recently gathered data in 240 subjects (Hartmann 1996) demonstrating that
reading, writing, and arithmetic are almost absent in dreams even in subjects
who spend four to eight hours every day engaged in these tasks. These same
people (frequent dream recallers), asked to rate the relative prominence of
various activities in waking vs. dreaming, on the average rated reading,
writing, and typing as "far less prominent in dreaming" whereas other
activities (walking, talking with friends, sexual activity) were rated almost as
prominent in dreaming as in waking.

Figure 2 employs a spatial map of different "regions", but this
should not be taken too literally and obviously does not correspond in any
simple way with the anatomy of the brain. It may be more meaningful to speak of
"modes of functioning" rather than regions: focused waking thought
follows the relatively serial A-B-C-D sequential mode of functioning related to
reaching a goal; dreaming uses a more parallel, unfocused, less directed mode.
Many kinds of connectionist nets have been modeled but they can be subdivided
roughly (Figure 3) into two categories: feed-forward nets and autoassociative
nets. A feed forward net consists of units in a number of "layers",
which act on each other unidirectionally; interaction "flows" forward
from input to output. In an autoassociative net (sometimes called an attractor
net) the connections are symmetrical; there is no clearly defined input or
output; the net "settles" into more or less stable patterns. I suggest
that in focused waking the net is employed as, or constrained into acting
relatively more as, a feed-forward net, whereas in dreaming it functions
relatively more as an autoassociative net. Here we are visualizing the same
process of "broader connections" as a shift in mode rather than a
shift to a different "region".

The reader will notice that I have been speaking of waking in a kind of
caricature as purely focused waking activity. Actually I believe that there is a
whole continuum on the dimension we are discussing from the most focused waking
thought through relaxed somewhat looser thought to reverie and daydreaming which
begin to resemble dreaming. In fact in most of the senses we have discussed one
can engage in relatively "dream-like" thought even while awake. This
has in fact been demonstrated by studies of daydreaming and mental activity
under relaxed isolated conditions by Foulkes and Fleisher (1975), Klinger
(1990), and Reinsel, et. al. (1992), among others. I have artificially broken
off the focused waking end of the continuum to make the distinction between
waking and dreaming most clear.

EMOTION GUIDES THE PROCESS—DREAMING CONTEXTUALIZES EMOTION

I have outlined above some ways in which dreaming appears to make connections
more broadly than waking, producing "generic" rather than
"specific" imagery—in a more "peripheral" portion of the
nets or in a more autoassociative fashion; but is this making of connections a
random process? I think not. In terms of a net such as I have discussed above,
there is a constant flow of excitation and shift of weights. One can see this as
an equilibration, a smoothing out of peaks and valleys. In an auto-associative
net this can be described mathematically as a settling into a pattern of reduced
"computational energy" or increased "harmony" (Smolensky
1986). We can visualize this as a windswept sea which when the wind dies down
tends to settle towards a relatively smooth surface. This settling occurs
especially when there is less new input and when the net functions less in a
feed-forward and more in an auto-associative mode—thus in dreaming. The
process can be seen as "driven" by regions of "storm" and
high waves—regions of the net with increased "charge"—or
computational energy. But these waves and wind are not random or meaningless. I
suggest that in everyday human terms they are the emotional concerns of the
dreamer. The data I have collected (below) suggests that emotion—the dominant
emotion of the dreamer—is the force which drives or guides the connecting
process and determines which of the countless possible connections are
actualized at a particular time and thus which images appear in the dream.
Dreams "contextualize" the dominant emotion.

DREAMS AFTER TRAUMA

For many of us leading fairly ordinary lives, there are many emotional
concerns active at any one time, and it is not easy to determine one dominant
emotion; thus our dreams often seem confused and almost random. However, if we
start with a clear-cut case—someone who has recently experienced a severe
trauma—then we know exactly what is on this person's mind and it may be easier
to see what is going on. I have been able to collect long dream series from a
number of people who experienced an acute trauma such as barely escaping from a
fire, being raped, or having someone killed next to them. These series often
clearly show connections being made between the traumatic event and other
images, past memories, etc. The connections appear to be guided principally by
the emotions or emotional concerns of the dreamer.

For instance a young man recorded a series of dreams after a small trauma at
age 15: He was traveling to Washington, D.C., with his parents and was
inadvertently locked into a room from which he could not escape for most of a
day and night. He became absolutely terrified, screaming, developing all kinds
of fantasies about what was happening to him. He summarizes:

"I then had many dreams and nightmares about this event. I was
always locked in, enclosed and trapped in some way but the dreams gradually
changed. Sometimes I was trapped in a room like the actual one, sometimes in
a very different situation. I also dreamt of being caught in a fire and of
drowning in a tidal wave. Sometimes my parents were there, sometimes scenes
from my childhood entered into the dreams. My dreams were playing with the
theme of my being trapped in a room and bringing in all kinds of things from
my life, from stories I'd read and from my imaginings."

A woman who was brutally raped had the following dreams over the next few
weeks:

I was walking down the street with a female friend and the woman's
4-year-old daughter. A gang of male adolescents in black leather started
attacking the child. My friend ran away. I tried to free the child, but I
realized my clothing was being torn off. I awoke very frightened.

I was trying to walk to the bathroom when some curtains began to choke
me. I was choking and gasping for air. I had the feeling I was screaming,
but actually I didn't make a sound.

I was making a movie with Rex Harrison. Then I heard a train coming right
at us, louder and louder; it was just about upon us when I woke up.

The dream is all in color. I'm on a beach. A whirlwind comes and envelops
me. I'm wearing a skirt with streamers. The whirlwind spins me around. The
streamers become snakes which choke me and I wake up frightened.

This woman's dreams incorporate some details of the rape experience (the
rapist, about 18 years old, entered her window through curtains and threatened
to strangle her with the curtains), but mainly she is dreaming about terror (a
child is attacked; she is choked; a train rushes at her; a whirlwind envelops
her; snakes choke her).

Several people in my series who escaped from fires dreamed first about fires
but then reported dreams of tidal waves and of being chased by gangs of
criminals. Alan Siegel (1996) has reported similar findings in his victims of
the Berkeley fire of 1991. Why dream about tidal waves or gangs of criminals
when you have just escaped from a fire? Obviously the dream images do not come
from the sensory input experienced in the fire but are guided by the dominant
emotions of terror, fear, or vulnerability.

In the material I have collected there is often a regular progression in
which dreams first appear to deal with or contextualize emotions such as terror,
fear, vulnerability; then, frequently, the dreams contextualize guilt—for
instance, survivor guilt. "In my dreams, most of the time I am getting hurt
in some way by my brother or I get hurt in an accident while my brother is
safe" (in actual fact, the dreamer's brother died in the fire from which
the dreamer escaped). In these situations, at least, dreaming does not make
connections in a random fashion; the dominant emotion guides the process. The
dreams make connections that contextualize the dominant emotion or emotional
concern.

My impression is that such simple dreams or dream images apparently
contextualizing an emotion are especially common after trauma. My coworkers,
Rachel Elkin and Holly Moulton, and I have been trying to quantify this
impression by scoring "contextualizing images" on a blind basis in
several series of dreams after trauma and dreams without trauma. So far, based
on sixty scored dreams, it does seem that such straight-forward contextualizing
images are far more frequent in dreams after trauma, though the scoring system
is still not perfected. When such an image occurs it is often quite clear-cut
and appears to be scorable as such without need for free association or other
information about the dreamer. For instance, here are some of the examples of
such dream images apparently contextualizing emotion from our collection of
dreams:

Fear, Terror:

A huge tidal wave is coming at me.

A house is burning and no one can get out.

A gang of evil men, Nazis maybe, are chasing me. I can't get away.

Helplessness, Vulnerability:

I dreamt about children, dolls—dolls and babies all drowning.

He skinned me and threw me in a heap with my sisters; I could feel the
pain; I could feel everything.

There was a small hurt animal lying in the road.

Guilt:

A shell heads for us (just the way it really did) and blows up, but I
can't tell whether it's me or my buddy Jack who is blown up.

I let my children play by themselves and they get run over by a car.

I leave my children in a house somewhere and then I can't find them.

Grief:

A mountain has split. A large round hill or mountain has split in two
pieces, and there are arrangements I have to make to take care of it.

A huge tree has fallen down.

I'm in this huge barren empty space. There are ashes strewn all about.

Over a period of weeks or months as the trauma gradually resolves, the dreams
often follow a discernable pattern. First the trauma is replayed vividly and
dramatically but not necessarily in precisely the way it occurred: there is
often at least one major change in the dream, something that did not actually
occur. Very rapidly the dreams begin to combine and connect this traumatic
material with other material that appears emotionally similar or related. Often,
as we have seen above, a person who has been through one kind of trauma dreams
of all kinds of other traumas that may be related to this same feeling of
helplessness, terror or guilt. In some cases this connecting involves
reactivating previous trauma and other emotionally important personal themes
evoked by the trauma ("rekindling"). If the dreamer is a
"survivor" while others have been killed or injured, the theme of
survivor guilt almost always emerges. The themes of the dreams and nightmares
are often "Was it him or was it me?" and/or "How come I survived
and he/she didn't?" (For instance: " ... a shell blows up but I can't
tell whether it's me or my buddy who is blown up"; "I get burned in
the fire and my brother's safe."). If someone was injured there is often a
theme of guilt in the sense of "did I have something to do with bringing
this on, was I responsible for it?" (This can occur even if there is
absolutely no realistic evidence that this was the case). The process of
connecting the trauma with other emotionally related material from the dreamer's
life (and imagination, reading, daydreaming) gradually expands and takes in more
and more other material; the trauma itself plays a smaller and smaller role and
the dreams return to their pre-trauma state.

The process seems to consist of cross-connecting or interweaving—making
connections with whatever related material is available in memory and
imagination, guided by the dominant emotions of the dreamer, which gradually
become less intense and change their character as the trauma is resolved or
integrated. Although at the level of the neural net we are still talking of
smoothing out peaks or waves or spreading excitation from over-excited zones,
the process follows definite non-random paths which we can understand in terms
of the dreamer's emotions and past experiences.

I will be shamelessly anthropomorphic for a minute and try to dramatize this
spread of excitation and making connections as though it were guided by a
separate person, perhaps a therapist, trying to help the trauma victim. This may
help us discern a possible quasi-therapeutic function of dreaming after trauma (Hartmann
1995, and see below). We can imagine the process as a series of
emotion-generated questions, and the dreaming mind's attempt to find some sort
of answers or at least a context.

First, absolute terror: THE WORLD IS ENDING! THIS IS THE MOST HORRIBLE
THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED TO ANYONE! HOW CAN ANYONE SURVIVE THIS? An
attempted answer along the lines of: "Well, let's take a look at what
happened. Let yourself picture it, and any other pictures that come to mind.
Picture whatever you want, picture other catastrophes. You're beginning to see
other people in similar situations, too. All these scenes are horrible, but not
unique; people seem to survive. In fact, does this remind you of anything else?
Let's look at other times when you felt terrified. Not quite the same? No, but
let's keep looking; wasn't there some similar feeling? Let's see what else is
related. And you survived. In fact you seem to be surviving this time. Let's see
what else comes to mind, even if it makes little sense just now." Terror
lessens; the basic human fears emerge: fear of annihilation, separation, loss,
etc.

Then guilt (survivor guilt): YES, I SEEM TO HAVE SURVIVED BUT HE WAS BLOWN
UP / WAS BURNED. HOW COME I SURVIVED? AND DID I REALLY? MAYBE I'M THE ONE WHO'S
DEAD / BLOWN UP / BURNED? I'M A MUCH WORSE PERSON THAN HE / SHE WAS. I CERTAINLY
DESERVE TO HAVE DIED..."Well, let's keep thinking about it, picturing
it. Picture yourself being hurt. See what pictures come to mind. This isn't the
first time you've been in a difficult situation...weren't there other times
something like this...with a feeling a bit like this? Let's see what happened.
Let's look at those times or maybe a situation involving someone else...even in
your childhood? What about you and your brothers or sisters? Haven't you been
through a lot? Maybe not just siblings; how about pets, animals, stories,
picture books? Things that stick in your mind. It may take a while but let's
look at all that. Let's put it in perspective. And is it that simple? Is it
always you who's unhurt while others are hurt? Aren't there a whole lot of such
experiences, real or maybe imagined, that were important for you? It seems that
sometimes you were hurt, sometimes others were, etc.. There are all sorts of
possibilities, all sorts of combinations."

And/or: I WAS ATTACKED, I WAS HURT / BURNED / RAPED, BUT IT WAS ALL MY
FAULT. I'M A HORRIBLE PERSON. I BROUGHT IT ALL ON, I DESERVE TO DIE..."Wait
a second; let's look at it. Let's look at what happened; let's look at what else
in your mind is connected to it, what else produced this kind of feeling. It
doesn't seem clear that you caused it all; isn't it like......when your were
much younger...yes I know you blamed yourself then too, but give yourself a
chance to make some more connections. Let's see what else is there. You were in
a complicated, difficult family situation...Now here's a place where it looks
like your father / mother didn't treat you well / didn't protect you...hurt you,
perhaps. The more we look the less clear it is that the fault is all
yours...let's go on..."

In other words, in these relatively straightforward cases after trauma, the
powerful emotion of the dreamer guides the dreaming process to choose or
illuminate patterns in the memory nets related to that emotional concern. In
terms of the nets of the mind, any input produces some change or disturbance in
the net; trauma produces a huge disturbance with over-excited zones or huge
storm-driven waves. Storms differ of course; the configuration of the
disturbance or storm is related to the nature of the trauma and to the
configuration and dynamics of the system (personality, past experiences). Any
such storm is emotional; we could try to picture individual emotion as sea
currents or wave patterns determined in part ("stirred up") by the
trauma but also dependent on what is happening and has happened below the
surface (subcortical connections). However I cannot here try to present a
neuroanatomy of what is for now still a metaphor. In a general sense the nets
after trauma are in an unstable configuration; the dreaming process involves
making connections guided by this instability and this may be part of the
process that restores a more stable state.

The above progression describes the situation in cases where the trauma
resolves relatively well and the patient recovers without developing chronic
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In severe cases, where classic Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder develops, the sequence is stopped short. The patient is stuck
with repetitive post-traumatic nightmares. These are classically described as
repeating the very earliest stages—picturing the trauma approximately as it
occurred; in my experience, however, the nightmares often repeat a slightly
later stage of the process with an added element of survivor guilt: "Was it
him or was it me?" For instance: "Then I open the last body bag and
the body inside is me! I wake up screaming." The actual traumatic scene
with this one amendment then becomes the repetitive traumatic nightmare (Hartmann
1984; Van der Kolk et. al. 1984).

FROM TRAUMA TO ORDINARY DREAMS

We have examined above the possibility that in dreams after trauma, as the
trauma resolves, the dominant emotions of the dreamer (first terror and fear and
then often guilt and others) guide or organize the connecting processes of
dreaming.

Dreams after trauma may appear to represent a rare situation and fortunately
for many of us this is so. However, those living in inner cities and many parts
of the Third World would strongly disagree. For them trauma is an almost
constant presence and dreams often reflect this. Likewise, one hundred thousand
years or so ago, when the human brain was gradually developing to its present
form, our lives were considerably more traumatic; the after-effects of trauma
may well have been an everyday reality and the resolving of trauma a constant
necessity. But however common or uncommon it may be in our lives, I suggest that
trauma can be seen as a paradigm or a simplest case in which we can see most
clearly what happens in dreams, and that probably other dreams follow the same
pattern though it may be more difficult to discern.

In someone who has just experienced a severe traumatic event, we can be quite
certain of the dominant emotions even without knowing the person's life in great
detail. Of course past experiences, day residues, etc. are not irrelevant; they
are, in fact, what is swept up by the emotion to form the pictures of the dream.
I believe, if we move on from trauma to somewhat less dramatic situations, we
can still see the same patterns though not always as clearly. For instance,
examining dreams in several specified stressful situations led Breger, et. al.
(1971) to formulate an adaptive view of dream functioning which relies heavily
on dreaming dealing in a symbolic fashion with the emotional concerns of the
dreamer. Cartwright (1991) in more formal research studies on people going
through divorce has come to somewhat similar conclusions. We are now dealing not
with one dominant emotion as after trauma but rather with a group of related
emotional concerns.

Dreams of pregnant women provide another situation in which there is a series
of somewhat predictable emotional concerns which can be traced in the dreams. I
have a few series, and such dreams have been studied in detail by Garfield
(1988), Maybruck (1989), and Van de Castle (1994) among others. The dominant
concerns early in pregnancy appear to be "what is happening to my
body?" which includes "will I still be attractive?" and the
dreams reflect this through changes of shape and increases in size of objects,
animals, etc. including creatures dreamt of as "ugly" or
"beautiful". Later there are concerns of "what will this thing,
this baby, actually be like" which leads to innumerable dreams of small and
then large creatures—sometimes monsters or strange ill-formed things—
portraying these concerns of the dreamer.

We sometimes know the dominant emotional concern of the dreamer quite well
even in someone who has not been in an acute trauma or stressful situation and
who is not pregnant. This occurs, for instance, in a patient we have gradually
come to know in therapy or psychoanalysis. I recently treated a mother of two
young children who was for the most part satisfied with her career and her
husband and as far as I could tell was a good wife and mother. However, in one
way her life was not going well. She was dominated by an obsessive emotional
concern that could be described as longstanding guilt, especially guilt about
not being a good enough mother. Her parents, for pathological reasons of their
own, had always been extremely demanding and critical; no matter what she did or
how well she did it as a child, she was always criticized and made to feel she
could have done better. She internalized this parental attitude and became, at
times, acutely unhappy during her childhood and adolescence—always feeling
guilty that she had done something wrong or had not measured up to an external
or internal standard. When she left home for college, her life improved
considerably. She actually had many intellectual and social talents which she
found (to her surprise) were appreciated outside of her home; she began to relax
and enjoy life. She finished college, became a nurse, and married a man with
whom she was in love. Everything appeared to be going beautifully until the
births of her two children. Becoming a mother herself revived her early concerns
about her inadequacy and brought back many criticisms by her parents, especially
her own mother. At this time she developed almost constant anxiety dreams and
nightmares, all of them dealing with a similar theme:

My children are lost in a storm; I can't find them.

I leave my son alone and a big cat is clawing him, killing him.

I'm at a hotel by the seashore in Maine. My two children are off in
separate rooms and the tide is coming up fast. I wake up panicked that
they'll drown.

Even without the benefit of her associations, I think it is clear that the
dreams are about her feelings of guilt and more specifically, they are
contextualizing her emotional concern, "I'm not a good mother; I'll never
be a good enough mother."

This woman is an example of what occurs more generally when there is one
dominant emotion or emotional concern; dreams find a way to portray it or
contextualize it repeatedly in what is often a fairly obvious manner. I could
give many examples from patients in therapy in which a known dominant emotional
concern is portrayed and readily decipherable. As a very simple example, three
different patients beginning psychoanalysis had similar dreams which went
approximately:

"I am walking along a mountain path with steep drop-offs on each
side. It is a bit dangerous. There is a large, shadowy figure accompanying
me—I am not quite sure whether this figure is good or evil."

These patients are obviously contextualizing the concerns involved in
beginning a long treatment with an unknown therapist or "guide". Even
Freud's famous Irma dream, which has been analyzed in many different ways, can
be looked at in a broad sense as contextualizing emotional concerns: the dreamer
is obviously worried about whether he is helping or hurting his patients and
about his reputation among his colleagues.

Recurrent dreams reported in a large percentage of students and usually
frightening or negative in tone (Cartwright and Romanek 1978) also provide an
opportunity to examine how dreams deal with emotional concerns. Larue (1970)
reports on a woman of twenty who had a recurrent dream off and on since a major
change in her life at age fourteen when she left her mother's house to live with
her father and stepmother.

....It is pitch black and like a vacuum. There is a vague feeling of
dizziness. A large, hairy (masculine) hand reaches out and pushes me into my
closet. The door cannot be opened. The hand sets the closet on fire and I
suffocate and die in the heat and smoke.

Obviously an emotional concern is being pictured though we do not have more
details.

I have spoken with three women who had recurrent dreams of violence and
murder including dreams of committing murder themselves. All three had had
abortions some years before and the dreams appeared to be picturing their
concerns about this. In fact, in two out of the three the recurrent dream
stopped after the women became aware of the connection and explored their
unresolved feelings about the abortions.

I have studied approximately 100 persons who suffered from lifelong frequent
nightmares (about 50 of these have been described in detail (Hartmann 1984)),
most of whom did not describe their dreams as recurrent dreams but nonetheless
dreamt repeatedly about the same themes. The dreams usually began in childhood
and the themes involved being chased by a monster or a strange animal. As the
dreamers grew up, the chaser was more likely to be a large unidentified man, a
group of frightening people, or a gang. Detailed interviews with these nightmare
sufferers suggested that most of them did not have a single acute trauma in
their childhood, but rather had "thin boundaries"—they were
unusually sensitive in a number of ways. Thus traumas that might have seemed
minor to others had a great impact on them and they felt highly vulnerable. In
their later nightmares they appeared to be repeatedly picturing fears and
vulnerabilities they had experienced in childhood. Almost all children have
nightmares of being chased at some point (most frequently at age 4 to 6); in
these cases the pattern seemed to continue into adulthood.

Physical illnesses are obvious sources of emotional concern. Dreams often
portray these concerns very vividly, at times even before the waking patient is
aware of the illness. A man awaiting vascular surgery on his leg, and afraid of
losing the leg, has dream images of defective tools or other defective objects
in eleven of fourteen recorded preoperative dreams (Breger, et. al. 1971).
Garfield (1991) has collected a large number of examples of dreaming in various
phases of physical illness which portray metaphorically (contextualize) the
dreamer's concerns about the illness.

The extensive body of literature on incorporation of external stimuli into
REM-dreams, from Dement and Wolpert (1958) to Nielsen (1993) can also be
considered in this light. The stimulus (water on the skin, sound, tightening of
a blood pressure cuff on the leg) produces a disturbance in the mind-nets of the
sleeper. The "storm" or emotional concern is a minor one compared to
the ones we have considered above, but its known source makes it more traceable.
When incorporation of the stimulus occurs (rates vary from 9% to 75%), the dream
does not merely report the stimulus ("there's a cuff on my leg") but
contextualizes the emotional concern: "The dream protagonist found his leg
to be paralyzed and unmovable despite his strongest attempts" (Nielsen
1993).

In many situations reviewed above we have been able to discern a dominant
emotion or an emotional concern fairly easily from the content of the dream
without obtaining a great deal of background information and associations to the
dream; but of course, this is not always possible. Using our image of a storm at
sea, we have looked at situations where there are large waves and perturbations
on the surface, where there is one fairly clear "storm" at work. Often
the sea may already be fairly calm without a great deal of storm activity or
there may be a number of minor storms in a number of different places, and in
such situations the processes we have discussed are difficult to discern. Indeed
there has been some laboratory research attempting to relate dream content to
students' "current concerns" generally asking judges to match dream
content and concerns on a blind basis (see Roussy, et. al. 1996 for a review and
a recent study). The results have often been negative or unconvincing. However
the concerns elicited in such studies deal with plans for the coming weekend,
making money at part-time jobs, etc. These concerns are relatively minor and I
am not certain they contain much "powerful emotion" or "emotional
concern" to be contextualized. The students may have in fact had more
important emotional concerns such as "how can I escape the influence of my
powerful mother (or father or background) and finally become a person on my
own?" but may have been unaware of these and/or not encouraged to think of
them by the conditions of the study. In a human being with an intact central
nervous system, I believe it is impossible for there to be no emotional concerns
whatever. More likely, there may often be a number of active concerns, with no
one of them so dominant as to single-handedly guide the formation of the
striking dream images we saw after trauma. This is where various techniques of
interpretation are useful. One can associate to each element of the dream as
Freud suggests. One can amplify certain images as per Jung or use any number of
interpretive techniques all of which will usually lead to emotional concerns of
the dreamer. I have little question that dreaming in this sense is the "
royal road to the unconscious"; I am not convinced, however, that every
dream is basically the fulfillment of a wish although in many cases a wish can
indeed be found within a dominant emotional concern.

In any case, I believe we can see dreams after trauma as a paradigm: the same
processes occur all the time though less clearly discernable. Dreams make
cross-connections—to distribute excitation or smooth out the net—guided by a
powerful emotion (in the simplest cases) or, more commonly, an emotional
concern. In the clearest cases, after trauma, the dreams need little
interpretation to discover the emotional concern. As we move to less dramatic
situations, with smaller disturbances in the net and multiple emotional
concerns, it is harder to see what is going on and some form of interpretation
is helpful.

DREAMS AS EXPLANATORY METAPHOR

So far, I have suggested that dreams make connections more widely, more
broadly, than waking and that the connections are guided by emotion. Dreams
contextualize emotion. But what form do these connections or contextualizations
take? Obviously they do not, or very rarely, take the form of verbal narratives
or mathematical formulas. Though we are often forced to work with verbal dream
reports, we need to keep in mind that these are only attempts to render the
dream experience in a preservable and reproducible form. What is experienced
generally is images and usually—at least in sighted persons—visual/spatial
images in motion. The dream-world looks very much like the waking world. The
visual/spatial form of dreams is a fascinating problem in its own right; for
instance, David Foulkes and his associates (1971) have studied in detail how the
visual/spatial imagery of dreaming develops gradually in children at about the
same time such imagery develops in waking life.

I do not consider it surprising that dreaming takes the form of moving
visual/spatial imagery because basically that is what’s there. The nets in our
minds are made of units and connection weights, which we cannot directly see or
experience, but which represent the ability to construct, or approximately
reconstruct, a visual/spatial "reality". This view derives from the
basic parameters of distributed processing: memory is not facsimile but
reconstitution. It is also consistent with work from a totally different
direction: Antonio Damasio (1994), based on his clinical neurological work with
brain-damaged patients speaks of knowledge as embodied in "dispositional
representations". "What 'dispositional representations' hold in their
commune of synapses is not a picture per se, but a means to reconstitute a
picture."

As we walk through life in a waking state, we are constantly constructing
visual/spatial imagery depicting our surroundings. This is based in part on
direct sensory input; but there is always a portion that derives from our own
experiences and personalities. It is well recognized that even while wide awake
the way we see the world depends to a certain extent on what we expect or wish
to see, depending on our beliefs or our emotional states. So that when (while
awake) we close our eyes or simply allow our minds to drift from the actual
scene before us, what we experience is generally more visual/spatial imagery,
somewhat dimmer often than the eyes-open version before us, but imagery just the
same and usually imagery in motion. The same thing happens in dreaming. For most
of us dreams are considerably more vivid than daydreams, which can probably be
related to the biochemical state of the brain, but the basic structure of the
dream is not so different. There is a visual/spatial story or sequence in
motion.

If we compare a dream with a directed focused waking thought, then we are
struck by how visual or perceptual dreaming seems to be. However, this may not
be the best comparison. We should rather compare dreaming (how our minds
function at night) with our total experience in waking (how our minds function
in the daytime) which includes living and navigating in the perceptual world as
well as the world of daydreams, fantasy, and imagination. As mentioned, under
certain conditions, waking activity is as visual and "dreamlike" and
bizarre as dreaming (Reinsel, et.al. 1992, Foulkes and Fleisher 1975).

Occasionally, a dream may simply pick up bits of daytime material (day
residue), or may consist of a word or a formula, but this is rare. When a dream
is fully structured—a true dream—its structure can be understood not only as
pictures in motion, but usually as metaphor in motion. In fact, Ullman (1969)
has written an entire paper on dreaming as metaphor in motion. I am using the
term metaphor in a very broad sense here consistent with modern linguistic
thinking. I am not speaking only of the technical rhetorical term metaphor in
which "man is a wolf" would be called metaphor whereas "man is
like a wolf" would be called simile. I am including similes and analogies
in the term metaphor, which is basically a noting and expressing of
similarities.

A group of modern linguists and philosophers has made us aware that metaphor
is constantly present not only in our speech but in our thought. Lakoff, in his
contemporary theory of metaphor, points out how our everyday thought and speech—even
when we are in no way being poetic—is pervaded by metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson
1980, Lakoff 1993a). For instance, the broad metaphors, "life is a
journey" and likewise "love is a journey" are ubiquitous: "I
am stuck", "our goals are in sight", "we are spinning our
wheels", "it should be smooth sailing from here on", "I have
to bail out of this relationship", etc. It is hardly surprising then that
in dreams, too, a journey by car frequently represents a relationship, and that
in general dreaming makes use of many of the same metaphors, as Lakoff (1993b)
points out.

In a very broad sense, any noting of similarities can be considered metaphor.
Much of the "connecting" or bringing together of similar networks
which occurs in dreaming (condensation) could be considered simple metaphor; for
instance: "I dreamt of my boyfriend and he turned into my father" or
"I dreamt of this monster but it looked a bit like my boyfriend".

But I believe dreaming is metaphor in a more specific sense. Although
theoretically and in some poetry metaphor can be of many different types, the
kind we use most often in our speech and thinking is what I would call
explanatory metaphor. Metaphor is used to explain something: a "first
term" (such as life, love, death, jealousy) which is somewhat abstract or
problematic is explained by a "second term" (such as a plant, a
journey, a departure, a green-eyed monster) which is simpler or more easily
pictured. In exactly this sense, I believe that dreams are explanatory metaphor.
The dream pictures metaphorically the overall state—especially the emotional
state—of the dreamer or at least part of the dreamer's mind. Again, this is
easiest to see in the clear-cut examples we have noted after trauma. "I am
drowning in a tidal wave" is a metaphorical description for the emotional
state of the dreamer involving terror and vulnerability. "A mountain has
split; there are pieces lying around and I must make arrangements about it"
is a metaphoric description of a state of mind and the concerns of a man whose
powerful and beloved mother has just died.

Some dreams in illness can be seen in the same way. The most dramatic example
I know is a patient described by Oliver Sacks in "Awakenings" (1973),
his series of case studies describing patients with post-encephalitic
Parkinsonism. This patient had a vivid dream that he was turning into a statue;
indeed he had a viral encephalitis which affected his brain in such a way that
within a few weeks he became a living statue, unable to talk and almost unable
to move until "awakened" by l-DOPA some forty years later.

Self-psychologists talk about the "self state dream" in which
occasionally a dream expresses the entire state of the patient's
"self". The example often cited involves a woman who dreamt of being a
comet that spent most of its time in the dark cold reaches of space and only
once in a long while came near the sun to absorb its heat and light. Kohut
(1977) claims this dream is a perfect (metaphorical) description of the
patient's state of mind. The dreams described previously, "I am walking
along a mountain path...", from patients beginning psychoanalysis, are also
clear metaphoric description of the emotional state of the dreamer.

Recent approaches to "dream working" and dream interpretation
likewise make use of this concept although they do not necessarily use the term
metaphor (Faraday 1974, Delaney 1979, Garfield 1991). For instance, in Gayle
Delaney's approach, the dreamer, after being asked to describe a dream in
detail, is asked for a bridge to waking life: "does this remind you of
anything or anyone in your waking life?" Does this remind you of any part
of yourself?" When there is a successful "bridge", when the dream
is understood by such dream working techniques, the understanding is in terms of
the dream providing a metaphorical description of an emotional concern of the
dreamer's, most often involving interpersonal relations.

I am not claiming that every piece of every dream must be understood as
explanatory metaphor. What I have discussed here, as well as in previous
sections, applies best to the major or striking visual features of a dream. Any
long dream also has portions which seem to serve mainly to provide continuity in
a relatively straightforward way; this is a whole separate topic that I cannot
discuss in detail here. But, following a suggestion by States (1995), we might
speak of metaphoric and metonymic elements in dreams. The metonymic elements
would be the less salient elements, pulled along by their proximity (past
connection) to a metaphoric element.

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES: DREAMING IS A THIN-BOUNDARY STATE

As outlined so far, I see dreaming as a process of making connections
broadly, making connections which contextualize emotion, and which can be seen
as a metaphoric explanation of the dreamer's state.

Obviously there are great individual differences, not only in frequency of
dream recall, but in how vivid, emotional, metaphoric, or, in a word,
"dreamlike", one's dreams are. Individual differences in dreaming,
about which much has been written, need not concern us here unless they can help
elucidate the nature of dreaming. I believe some light may be shed on the nature
of dreaming by work over the past years on thin and thick boundaries in the
mind. I suggest that in a broad sense mental functioning during dreaming (as
opposed to focused waking) is like the overall functioning of people with very
thin boundaries (as opposed to those with very thick boundaries). Dreaming is a
thin boundary state.

Briefly, thickness or thinness of boundaries refers to a dimension of
personality which relates to the degree of separateness or compartmentalization
(thickness) versus fluidity or merging (thinness) in all mental functions (Hartmann
1991a). Someone with very thick boundaries keeps perceptions, thoughts, and
feelings distinct and separate; keeps time and space well organized; tends to
think in black and white; has a clear demarcated sense of self; and is usually
very solid, well defended, sometimes even rigid. Someone with very thin
boundaries is the opposite: may experience synesthesia; allows thoughts and
feelings to merge; often has vivid fantasies, not always distinguished from
reality; is less well defended; tends to think in shades of gray; has a less
solid sense of self; and becomes over-involved in relationships. It turns out
that boundary thinness is highly correlated with Costa and McCrae's dimension of
personality called "openness to experience" (McCrae 1994).

We demonstrated some intriguing relationships between dreaming and thinness
of boundaries measured on the boundary questionnaire (Hartmann 1991a, Hartmann,
et. al. 1991). First of all, in over 800 subjects, there was a highly
significant correlation (r = .40) between thinness of boundaries and dream
recall frequency. Further, a subgroup of frequent dreamers (reporting 7 or more
dreams per week) had significantly thinner boundaries than nondreamers. In fact,
the frequent dreamers had thinner scores in all 12 categories of the boundary
questionnaire covering everything from sensitivity to views about organizations
and the world. Frequent dreamers also were significantly thinner on the first
three major factors of the boundary questionnaire. Finally, the dreams of people
with very thin boundaries were rated by blind judges as significantly more
vivid, detailed, emotional, bizarre, and dreamlike, and with more interaction
between characters compared to dreams of those with thick boundaries (Hartmann,
et. al. 1991). Also, we found that certain definable groups who scored
significantly thicker than average on the boundary questionnaire (naval
officers, lawyers, patients diagnosed Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder,
patients with alexithymia) all reported very few dreams, much fewer than
average. Conversely, groups who scored thin on the boundary questionnaire
(including art students and patients diagnosed Borderline Personality Disorder
or Schizotypal Personality Disorder) reported more dreams than average. Thus
thin boundaries and dreaming are related in some way.

Also, in terms of their mental functioning, people with thick boundaries are
described as more focused, thinking in a straight line, thinking from A to B to
C to D with relatively few detours, whereas people with thin boundaries explore
all kinds of side connections; their thinking is less straight-forward but more
flexible, more creative (Hartmann 1991). In all these senses the mental
processes of those with very thick boundaries resemble the processes of focused
waking, whereas the mental processes of those with thin boundaries involves
something more like daydreaming or dreaming.

Thus, what I am suggesting is that the continuum running from very thick
boundaries to very thin boundaries bears some similarity to the continuum from
focused waking thought at one end to dreaming at the other end. I believe this
could lead to some interesting studies. For instance, a preliminary study (Kunzendorf,
et. al., unpublished) finds that overall dreams are rated more
"bizarre" than daydreams, but the daydreams of subjects with thin
boundaries are rated just as "bizarre" as the night dreams of subjects
with thick boundaries. In any case, these interpersonal differences may tell us
something about the nature of dreaming; another way to approach the
connectiveness of dreaming is to consider dreaming a "thin boundary"
state.

THE FUNCTIONS OF DREAMING

I have outlined above my views about the fundamental characteristics of
dreaming and how dreaming differs from waking—in other word the basic nature
of dreaming. But is this simply the way things are or does dreaming have a
function? Does it play a role in maintaining the human organism? In brief, I
believe dreaming does have a function which can be related to but is not the
same as the function of REM sleep. Starting again with my material on dreams
after trauma as the trauma is resolving, I have suggested that dreaming has a
quasi-therapeutic function (Hartmann 1995). Dreaming allows the making of
connections in a safe place. I reviewed many similarities between dreaming
(whether or not remembered) and the process of psychotherapy, especially after
trauma. Both good psychotherapy after trauma and dreaming first provide a safe
place for work to be done. In therapy the safe place is much more than the
physical setting; it involves the safe "boundaries" of the therapeutic
situation and the gradual trusting alliance formed between patient and
therapist. In dreaming—especially in REM sleep—the safe place is provided by
the well-established muscular inhibition which prevents activity and the acting
out of dreams.

Once a safe place is established the therapist allows the patient, especially
the traumatized patient, to go back and tell her or his story in many different
ways, making connections between the trauma and other parts of the patient's
life—overall making connections and trying to integrate the trauma. Dreaming
performs at least some of these same functions—since its nature is making
connections broadly in a safe place. As connections are made between the
terrible recent event and other material, the emotion becomes less powerful and
overwhelming and the trauma is gradually integrated into the rest of life. Thus,
dreaming appears to have a quasi-therapeutic adaptive function which can be seen
most easily after trauma though I believe again that trauma is a paradigm and
that dreaming has the same function, though less easily discernible, at other
times.

In terms of the nets of the mind, the spreading out of excitation or
"computational energy" (the subsiding of storm waves) is useful in
presumably allowing the net to function better, in a more harmonious state. But
the effect is not purely "energetic"; the spread of excitation or
energy occurs by forming cross-connections which inevitably alter the future
functioning of the net. The trauma, or any disturbance, is cross-connected,
"woven in" by dreaming as numerous new connections and contexts are
provided. This process is likely to be useful for future functioning since a new
trauma or disturbance will be less serious, will produce less
"storm-waves" since appropriate contexts and cross-connections are
already present. In our anthropomorphic terms, a future disturbance will produce
relatively less of the reaction: "HELP! THE WORLD IS ENDING",
"THIS IS THE MOST HORRIBLE THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED" and more of
"YES, THIS FEELS BAD BUT IT'S A BIT LIKE....", "I'VE EXPERIENCED
THIS, I'VE WORKED ON THESE FEELINGS", or "I'VE DEALT WITH SOMETHING
LIKE THIS".

Thus, I suggest that the broad making of connections and contextualizing has
a function which can be seen as both restorative/adaptive in an immediate sense
(spreading excitation, calming the storm) and as producing changes in memory
networks which are adaptive for the future. This change in networks is not a
consolidation of memory but a broadening of memory through cross-connections—an
increase in connections, a weaving in of new experience.

This suggested function of dreaming is compatible with views proposed by a
number of others starting from very different data bases. For instance, French
and Fromm (1964) and Palombo (1978) using clinical data, Breger, et. al. (1971)
studying acutely stressful situations, and Cartwright (1991) in research on
people under a prolonged stress (divorce), have all proposed versions of an
adaptive function of dreaming. Jones (1970) made an analogy between dreaming and
effective psychotherapy. Koulack (1991) has proposed a complex functional theory
which at least in part involves "mastery of stress". Fiss (1986) has
proposed that dreams function to maintain "self structures". Greenberg
and Perlman (1975, 1993) have suggested several versions of an adaptive
problem-solving function. Milton Kramer (1993) has proposed a "selective
mood regulation" function of dreaming which derives from very different
studies but is similar to what I have been discussing in terms of a calming of
stormy seas or spreading out of excitation. I believe all these views are very
compatible with what I have proposed above. We are in basic agreement, at least
about certain functions of dreaming, and I hope that my proposal of
cross-connections in neural nets may be helpful in integrating these viewpoints.

Critics skeptical about any function of dreaming often question how dreams
can be important if most of them are forgotten. I suggest that remembering the
individual dream images is not what is essential—though sometimes, of course,
a remembered dream image can be extremely important in learning about oneself in
therapy or in producing a work of science or art (see below). What is important
is probably the making of cross-connections in the net, the redistribution of
weights, etc. as we have discussed, all of which can occur whether or not the
actual dream content is remembered. Of course, our thoughts and theories about
dreaming—including the present one—are necessarily based on examination of
the subset of dreams that have been remembered.

Although dreaming should not be confused with REM sleep, nonetheless most of
our memorable dreams come from REM sleep, which is the ideal place for dreaming
activity to occur; thus a theory of the functions of dreaming should at least be
compatible with the functions of REM sleep. As I have pointed out, the present
function of dreaming in terms of making connections and cross-connections is at
least compatible with the view that REM sleep, especially in young organisms,
helps to develop the nervous system (Roffwarg, et. al. 1966)—evidently by
making or organizing new connections. It is also compatible with the view that
REM sleep functions in the "repair, reorganization, and formation of new
connections in amine-dependent forebrain systems" summarized as
"knitting up the raveled sleave of care" (Hartmann 1973).

THE DREAM REMEMBERED: PROBLEM SOLVING, THERAPY, SCIENCE, ART

We have discussed above how the making of connections broadly
(cross-connecting) in dreams is a function which must operate whether or not
dreams are actually remembered. In addition to this, connections brought to
waking from remembered or even half-remembered dreams can be useful to our
waking thought processes in any number of ways.

At a simple level, a young woman dreamt, "my boyfriend turned into my
father" and found this a very useful insight which she had not previously
noticed and which helped her in thinking about her relationship. This sort of
thing happens all the time and can be made use of by the dreamer with or without
the help of a therapist. Barrett (1993) tried to study this objectively and
found that at least one third of dreams by college students trying to
"incubate" a problem included at least a partial solution to the
problem, as rated by the dreamers and by a group of judges.

We are all familiar with the many examples of works of art and scientific
discoveries attributed by their creators to a dream. In my view, the role of
dreaming has at times been greatly exaggerated; it is obvious that the great
preponderance of problem solving and creative work in science and art is
performed in the waking state—though the work often dips into reverie and
daydreaming—the more dreamlike parts of waking. I do not believe that works of
art are created in dreams with any frequency. For instance, though Robert Louis
Stevenson claimed that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came to him in a dream, I think
it likely that the dream provided one new image—presumably a respectable
doctor turning into a hideous monster—and Stevenson's well-prepared waking
mind and story-writing skills took over from there.

Along the lines developed in this paper, I am suggesting that the
contribution made to these works by dreaming is a new connection derived from
the broader and more auto-associative connecting found in dreams; the waking
mind does the rest. However, this apparently tiny contribution—one new
connection—may be exactly what is needed. There are many instances of athletes
who found themselves trying out a small new variation of their technique (a
different golf grip for instance or skating technique) in their dreams and then
finding it crucial in waking; and there are examples of inventions depending on
one small new "twist"—Elias Howe's sewing machine needle with the
hole at the tip is the best known example. Along these lines, it seems not
unreasonable to suggest that our ancestors may have used the new connections
made in their dreams to develop new types of tools, weapons, chariots, etc—
minor innovations which nonetheless played a major role in our world.

Greenberg, R., & Pearlman, C. (1975). A psychoanalytic dream continuum:
the source and function of dreams. The International Review of
Psychoanalysis, 2, 441-448.

Greenberg, R., & Pearlman, C. (1993). An integrated approach to dream
theory: contributions from sleep research and clinical practice. In A. Moffitt,
M. Kramer, R. Hoffmann (Eds.), The Functions of Dreaming. Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press.

Jones, R. M. (1970). The New Psychology of Dreaming. New York: Grune
and Stratton.

Klinger, E. (1990). Daydreaming. Los Angeles, CA: Jeremy P. Tarcher.

Kohut, H. (1977). The Restoration of the Self. New York: International
Universities Press.

Koulack, D. (1991). To Catch a Dream. Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press.

Kramer, M. (1993). The selective mood regulatory function of dreaming: an
update and revision. In A. Moffit, M. Kramer, R. Hoffman (Eds.), The
Functions of Dreaming. New York: State University of New York Press.

Kunzendorf, R. G., Hartmann, E., Cohen, R., & Cutler, J. (to be
published). The Daydreams of Subjects with Thin Boundaries are as Bizarre as
the Dreams of Those with Thick Boundaries.